At the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole revisits or tries to revisit many people and places he encountered earlier in the story. First, he goes back to the jail town that he was held in with Blevins and Rawlins to try to retrieve their horses. He ends up doing so, but gets shot in the process. As a consolation prize, he takes the captain hostage, and also shakes off the people chasing him. In this part of the novel it is fairly evident that John Grady Cole has been hardened by the events of his adventure. This shines through when Joh Grady Cole uses his own weapon to cauterize his wound, and resolves to keep moving despite his pain even when the captain begs to take a break. John Grady Cole may have done these things at the beginning of the novel, but the intenseness of his attitude makes it clear he isn’t really a young teenage anymore, and instead has adopted the attitude of the “wild west”.
He then comes back to America, hearing about his dad’s death in the process. At this newsJohn Grady Cole cries for the first time in the story. He later appears before a court, telling them his entire story, and the judge rules that he can keep the horse. John Grady later talks to the judge, saying that he doesn’t feel comfortable with the fact that the judge treated him sort of like a hero, even when he did wrong. This is interesting from the reader’s perspective because John Grady Cole is the protagonist of the story, and he always tries to do right. Still, John Grady Cole ended up doing some things that weighed on his conscience, including killing someone, and even though most of them did not feel like his fault to the reader, John Grady couldn’t get them out of his head. It just goes to show that no matter how moral you are, there is no way to come out of a lawless life fully clean.
John Grady tries to track down the owner of Blevins’ horse, bringing him to the home of Jimmy Blevins, whom he found on the radio. Though Jimmy Blevins and his wife do not turn out to be the owner of the horse, he has dinner with them. He also goes to meet Rawlins, but there seems to be some distance between the two. Lastly, he attends the funeral of Abuela, and the rides off into the sunset, seemingly aimlessly.
It is fitting at the end of the novel John Grady returns home, but home is not the same as it was when he left. He is not the same either. It is unclear which changed more. Following a central theme in the novel, I think that once Cole decided to leave home, he was fated to never come back, and continue being a wanderer, even if his adventure left him with many physical and emotional scars.